What that one-year performance cannot predict, however, is long-term success.
True success can only be measured over time. And the Corporate Report 100 charts this through repeat appearances on the list. A company cannot fluke its way on to the list 10 or more times in a quarter-century. To make that many appearances, a company requires a host of entrepreneurial virtues.
In the course of making a documentary on his extraordinary career as an entrepreneur, I have had the recent privilege of interviewing Henry Bloch at some length. What we discussed were the values necessary to accomplish what Henry and his brother Richard had: that is, start a company from nothing and build it to the undisputed international leader in a given field. In Bloch’s case, tax preparation.
Long-term success begins with having the will and the drive to start a business. Early on, entrepreneurs have to learn how to accept risk and deal with failure. Few businesses succeed out of the chute. The Blochs struggled for eight years before hitting on a winning formula. Then, when the opportunity comes, entrepreneurs have to have the foresight to seize it and to pursue it vigorously. As they grow, they have to keep customer satisfaction at the center of their game plan and, importantly, they have to avoid shortcuts.
The company profiles that follow all come close to matching the Bloch model, and all find a place among the firms that have appeared most frequently on the CR 100, including the top three spots on that list. All five of these firms were founded in the Kansas City area within the past 45 years—four of them within a 10-year stretch—and all have had impact well beyond our borders.
No. 1: Lockton Companies, 18 appearances
When Jack Lockton started the company that bears his name in the basement of his house in 1966, he could not possibly have imagined that it would become the 10th-largest insurance brokerage firm in the world and the world’s single largest, privately owned, independent insurance broker.
Or could he? Lockton, who died in 2004, may have had grander ambitions than his basement beginnings suggest. He did, after all, design the company logo around a globe. And today, with 3,800 employees in at least 13 countries, that logo seems altogether appropriate. In the course of that growth, Lockton has found its way onto the CR 100 list a record 18 times.
More important to the company’s success than the logo was the foundation upon which Lockton and his colleagues built the company, one very much like the Blochs’—that of integrity and customer service. If most companies in this industry grow through acquisitions, Lockton has grown through the business written or renewed by its producers. This may have meant slightly slower growth, but it also meant surer, more stable, more organic growth, growth that did not strain the corporate culture, but reinforced it.
Peter Staddon, of the British Insurance Brokers Association, addressed the issue of Lockton’s success. “I’ve always felt the private companies are in this business because they want to be,” he observes. “I like to think they’re a little bit more personal, value relationships, and they’re not purely after the bottom-line.
No. 2: Cerner Corp., 17 appearances
Neal Patterson, who grew up on a family farm in Oklahoma, brought some of those rural virtues to the enterprise he started in 1979 with Cliff Illig and Paul Gorup. In 2001, in fact, Patterson attracted worldwide attention for an e-mail that questioned why the Cerner staff was not keeping the kind of farmer’s hours a farmer’s son might have expected.
Although CEO Patterson might have expressed himself more artfully, he did manage to convey the seriousness with which he expected Cerner managers to take their business. That seriousness of purpose has helped put Cerner on the CR 100 list 17 times.
Thirty years after the company’s humble beginnings, Cerner today has more than 8,000 clients worldwide. With a focus on health care, the company builds unified, integrated systems that clients use to share information.
As Henry Bloch has observed, successful entrepreneurship invariably demands a willingness to run risks. And Cerner did just that a decade or so ago when it bet the farm on the development of Cerner Millennium, the first of its kind “person-centric” architecture designed to advance the digitization of individual electronic medical records. This multi-billion dollar investment continues to drive the business and, indeed, the whole industry.
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